aside: despite the fact that Objective Caml is currently turning up the heat in the usable-functional-language wars, and even has a passable emacs clone, there is new competition (with slightly cleaner syntax) in the most recent O'hugs release. the async reactive objects thing is pretty well developed, and it even manages to introduce ":=" in a way which is not an awful hack circumventing the denotational semantics. functionalists rejoice, the time for writing
non-academic programs may nearly be at hand!